The chiefs strongly re-elected a man who has chosen to try to work with, rather than petulantly butt heads against, the government. Is that “pretty strong evidence that [First Nations are] not happy with what’s happening,” as Atleo challenger Pamela Palmater contended during the campaign? No: It’s pretty strong evidence that though the stubborn hardliners may be louder and more apt to be quoted in the media than their more conciliatory First Nations peers, they don’t represent the majority First Nations view.

Leading up to the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) leadership election, it sounded like Shawn Atleo was going to have a tough time getting re-elected as national chief: He was facing seven vocal challengers and trying to refute accusations that he was an assimilationist who’d grown too close to the Conservative government.

Yet not only did Atleo win, he did so quite handily under the circumstances, taking a majority in the first ballot and wrapping the whole thing up in the third with 67% of the vote. The claims that he has divided the chiefs and made life worse for First Nations during his tenure ring somewhat hollow given these results, especially when it’s remembered that it took Atleo eight ballots to get elected the first time, three years ago.

If part of what Atleo’s critics and opponents had hoped to achieve was more confrontational rhetoric, they attained a small victory there: Atleo didn’t exactly talk trash about the feds, but his post re-election speech included a renewed promise to “open doors, or kick them down,” and a rallying cry to “put the final stake in colonization.” He followed up with the crowd-pleasing claim that “no government has acted in good faith.”

Of course, none of that changed the fact that the chiefs strongly re-elected a man who has chosen to try to work with, rather than petulantly butt heads against, the government. Is that “pretty strong evidence that [First Nations are] not happy with what’s happening,” as Atleo challenger Pamela Palmater contended during the campaign? No: It’s pretty strong evidence that though the stubborn hardliners may be louder and more apt to be quoted in the media than their more conciliatory First Nations peers, they don’t represent the majority First Nations view.

[np-related]

In fact, if you consider the fact that status Indians who have chosen to live off-reserve are not represented at all in the AFN vote (which is itself problematic), then it seems likely that the country’s First Nations population as a whole is far more interested in moving forward, and far less interested in wallowing in accusations and demands, than the picture painted by news stories and certain high profile chiefs and critics would suggest.

In this sense, Atleo’s re-election should be seen as a particularly encouraging sign. He may not be the leader who gets the changes made that are needed to improve First Nations lives – recognition of property ownership, representation for off-reserve status Indians, spending accountability for chiefs. He doesn’t champion such causes — perhaps not subscribing to the view that they’re desirable, or perhaps recognizing that their polarizing power might really HAVE lost him the election. But he’s stable, reasonable and moderate enough to keep First Nations communities in a position from which those changes can be made in the future by another leader.

This matters because the progression from Shawn Atleo to such a leader seems plausible in a way that the progression from, say, Pamela Palmater, or former national chief Phil Fontaine, to such a leader does not.

Atleo is not a leap forward, then, but he’s a step that way. Add up the votes for him and you get a message that a quiet First Nations majority recognizes as much.

How do you get from there to a situation where open debate about First Nations property rights is possible, and individual natives are empowered to control their own lives and funds, rather than having them squandered by a chief? I don’t rightly know. But at least now we have three more years to work toward finding out.

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